It’s striking that even at #occupyLSX, in an environment daring to think radically different, much of the debate centres on ways to collect more tax and the places to spend it.
Moreover, news that a fiscally-conservative group of Labour thinkers at Policy Network are publishing an ‘In the Black Labour’ pamphlet, the tax-and-spend case may not even win over the Labour party itself.

There seems two ways of grappling with the issue. You can try and out-muscle the Tories, promise similar cuts and slip a few stealthy tax-funded concessions in through the back door, or you can rethink how the entire welfare state functions and find the savings through that.

The first option is, in fact, an easier argument to make. Cutting state services seems decisive and chimes with an electorate deeply reluctant to opening its wallet. But it’s as easy for those who don’t rely on state provisions as it is painful for those who do.

The second option – transforming the welfare state – is harder both conceptually and politically – but is exactly what the Blue Labour brand of left-wing thought is aimed at.

Only in Rowenna Davis’s book on Blue Labour is the point (widely missed by others) made clearly: “The ideas don’t seem to rely on extra state funding,” she writes. “At a time when public money is tight and Labour has been labelled as profligately overspending this is essential.”

It is a picture of a welfare state crafted less on service provision and more relationship building. If that sounds fuzzy here’s an example from Participle, a social care charity, and their programme to provide care for the elderly.

Many illnesses in old age emerge from loneliness. Research shows, for example, that a link exists between lack of social interaction and Alzheimer’s disease. The illness costs an estimated £17bn each year. At the moment the NHS provides services to treat those symptoms, but Participle thought about the causes and came up with a creative programme called Southwark Circle, which was featured in the Guardian (and elsewhere) two years ago.

[The programme] is winningly simple. Watch a short video on the website, and you get the entire idea. People pay a fee and thereby become entitled to home visits from security-checked helpers – some paid, some volunteers – who can do anything from hacking back bushes in the garden to setting up the Freeview box on the TV to teaching you how to send text messages to your grandchildren. If you like, you can reduce your quarterly fee by becoming a helper yourself, visiting others and using your skills to help them… Early estimates suggest Southwark council will save £5 for every £1 they put into the Circle.

Unlike the Big Society, which relies on such programmes springing up magically in a vacuum, Blue Labour sees the state as crucial in helping them form.

Rather than agonising on new ways to find more money, this is what the Left should be devoting its energy to: taking a social problem, finding what relationships need to be built to help tackle it, and then using state capacity to help achieve just that.

Participle has more examples – from employability, to crisis families – that are at once fiscally conservative and socially radical. Given this potential it seems strange that cheerleaders for both aren’t making more of it.

—Sahil Dutta is a DPhil candidate in International Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Also at @sahildutta

Reader comments

The Localism basis of both Blue Labour & the Red Book are promising, they both show different ideas for ‘local social democracy.’ & Cooperativism, by rebinding communities together, it will not only help with budgets, but also a sense of community pride, absent in a lot of areas for the last 20 years, and also strengthen the bases of making the 1% cooperate

Maybe I’m missing something here but isnt being left wing more to do with social justice and inclusivity. Sadly you dont get that in a capitalist society which continually redistributes weath upwards.Hence taxation. If you want a society based on relationships then that has to presuppose a degree of commonality in terms of outlook and expectations . That commonality ultimately depends on everybody getting a reasonable slice of the pie. The point about Alziemers is well made until you factor in the predesposing nutritional aspects and then consider the commodification of foodstuffs and medicine in this country which only serve to reinforce bad eating and diminish public health programs. Unfortunately until capitalism is tamed by the state blue ideas are as effective as the big society.
Closing tax loopholes and offshore entities,making all enterprises operating in the UK subject to full UK Tax, a proper Freedom of information Act and a Land Registry, recording ownership, will not involve spending but will be a significant engine to creating a sutained redistributive process.

I think a degree of mutualism and co-operativism should be important factors in a progressive solution to our current problems. We cannot simply carry on enlarging the state and asking for its help. However if we are to help more people live better lives there is an inevitable need to have a more redistributive system of taxing and spending: The state in effect needs to be a general facilitator rather than sugar daddy, but with a strong focus on those areas where its efforts benefit most.

4
This is the problem with debating about ‘the left’, it’s a broad spectrum and, sadly, does not include the current Labour Party.
‘The left’ has always been associated with spending (in a capitalist society) ostensibly this is the attempt to balance out the inequality created by the economic system, clean-up the externalities created by the system and to address the education and health of society for the benefit of becoming exploited fodder for capitalists. Perhaps the most novel has been the taxation of all to bolster-up the profits of said capitalists who won’t pay a decent wage to their employees.
Socialism, on the other hand, isn’t about spending money, indeed there would be much less waste than under a capitalist system, redistribution of work and time is far more efficient than employing a complex tax system that can be manipulated by a few but for big money.

I think you miss a fundamental point. The left believe in a redistribution of wealth that of course could and should be translated into the provision of socialised services, but, it is also about putting money in people’s pockets so that they can make real choices for themselves.

So for example, real wages for the vast majority have not been raised in the last thirty years and it may logically follow that people will rely on the state because they increasingly have to.

As a socialist I have long believed that society does have to own and provide key services that maintain a base standard of living in a civilised society, but where the vast majority (as opposed to a wealthy minority) can pay, then it gives ordinary people choices whicg they should have in a free society.

In view of the dire state of the country with austerity from the government and the like, it isn’t just that Labour can’t articulate a credible position on the economy (clearly they can’t) everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room which is Miliband.

For an official opposition to be going into a future election effectively crippled with such a weak leader is bonkers.

Whilst the Labour Party are led by this unrepresentative individual they will not be taken seriously by the electorate. If they invented a cheap way of turning seawater into gold no one would listen.

WIth the polls giving Cameron a clear lead over Miliband even in these times it shows how awful the opposition leader is and when Labour finally rid themselves of him, which they will, then their position on the economy may be considered…

Even after the deficit is reduced, the state will still be spending some £700bn a year. That’s less in
real terms than before the Crash but still a very significant proportion of the UK’s GDP. It means the
state can still do much to promote equality and social justice but it will also mean facing up to big
strategic choices about how to use existing expenditure. As such, given the flat-lining economy, the
hit to living standards and the need to identify new sources of potential growth, Labour’s criteria for
spending choices should be based on a simple question: will a spending option directly boost short
and long-term growth and create jobs? This may mean very constrained funding for healthcare,
pensions and welfare for the foreseeable future. It’s tough, but the alternative is ducking the genuine
decisions nearly every government of an
advanced economy currently faces.

So hit those at the bottom and do not annoy those in the middle or the Top real New labour.

labour will not win because it’s lost it’s self in the mire of being a second Tory party, it has little to offer the Tories are not already offering

7
Not sure if you were responding to my post, but, socialism is an economic system, if you are on the left and are in favour of redisributing wealth in a capitalist society, you are not a socialist, probably a social democrat.

@9 Labour will not win because frstly they completely failed to convince the great british public that the financial crisis was to do with corrupt financial practice on a world scale. Since the Tories convinced everybody that all the current finacial ills stem from Labour it will take Labour years to overcome the moniker of being the party that cant run the economy. Secondly, they will not win because Miliband has all the charisma of a dead fish and looks pretty much the same. Although I hate to say that about him,the reality of modern politics is ALL about looks and presentation and little about substance.

Why is it that, at a time of maximum opportunity, we have this throng of neo-Blairites attempting to “frame the debate” – to get Labour to commit to Tory policies? We had Blue Labour, now Black Labour – and Hutton on the radio this lunchtime.

At a political level it is insane to try to triangulate the Tories on the debt/deficit – just as the Blairite “third way” also led to “just more of the same” – the same old Tory policies.

What Labour needs – as Sadiq Khan did on the radio on Friday – is to concentrate on their own themes. Unemployment and the tanking economy, and the alternative, which is investment.

@ManonClaphamOmnibus @RobertAnderson I completely agree that lefty politics is about social justice, inclusivity and (in my mind) equality. But the route to this I see more in challenging inequality of power. Redistributive tax is an essential part of this (and a land value tax would be much more radical) but isn’t the whole. Take income: rather than, say, increasing top-rate tax to 60% and redistributing to the poor, worker representation on corporate boards would limit top-rate pay to more reasonable levels and help push up wages at the other end of the scale. This redistributes power, which in turn redistributes income rather than the taxes, which, even if passed, would only do the latter. So I think lefty politics, alongside the building of relationships in the welfare state is about challenging inequality of power. Co-ops, local banks, savings and credit unions are all part of that too.

The reason we have a large deficit is because the private banking sector collapsed, unloading worthless debt onto the taxpayer.

This is yet another ‘leftist’ article that falls into the trap of arguing that welfare is ‘unaffordable’.

The only other alternative is mass euthanasia – either by commission or ommission/neglect (septicemia seems to be the preferred option).

The problems we face cannot be solved until we address the underlying cause – an out-of-control finance sector which is draining the lifeblood out of the economy. That’s something both free-marketeers and social democrats agree on.

‘Localism’ is just a diversionary dead-end – otherwise known as ‘the postcode lottery’

It’s more than a little peculiar IMO to claim that the New Labour government was “profligate” without reference to any data source to substantiate that claim as though this matter is in the realms of blatant political propaganda rather than analysis.

On the evidence of OECD figures, general government expenditures as a percentage of national GDP in the UK in 2007, prior to the onset of the financial crisis and the recession as from 2008Q1, appears to have been modest as compared with a string of other countries in western Europe.

If so, exactly what are the grounds for claiming that New Labour was “profligate”?

In terms of presentation, while these projects may add up to a much better, or at least cheaper, programme of government they are often individually small, and don’t sound as good as spending X billions on Y; something which is also, in its way, the approach of the Coalition government (and, what’s more conservative than thinking higher pay = better staff?). They’re often longer term, which doubles down on the difficulty of selling them. There have also been too many cases of governments backing projects based on whims, pushed by fly-by-night gurus, resulting in modest transfers of public money to consultants and website designers and with little to show. People are correct to be wary.

And even where the theories are correct these things still cost. They may be cheaper that the alternative, they may be much better in the long run but they cost money to start them up. So you’re going to have to choose between a) backing the mind-boggling concept of spending money now to save money later b) cutting somewhere else to fund what will be seen, rightly, as experiments c) asking people to do it themselves for free either as a new part of their current public sector jobs or something about volunteering (although I would have thought one good thing about volunteering is that you get to choose what to do) or apparently d) asking lonely people to pay £10 for an hour’s chat.

Additionally there are, I suppose, some cases where you may think that you only need the right changes in the law, but I don’t think we should be any more sanguine about legislating away inequality than about using money as a tool.

Yet that said, it’s inarguably correct that all sides need to get on with suggesting things in this fashion rather than assigning colours to varying degrees of severity of fiscal policy. Although bagsy Viridian Labour.

@16 – note the difference between saying someone is profligate and saying someone has been labelled as profligate. An unkind person might say the latter is a way to make an accusation without being burdened by facts. An honest person, however, would accept that mud sticks.

Incidentally, surely it’s not the case that New Labour didn’t try lots of schemes to get positive results without spending (much) more money? That’s presumably one reason why they kept schtum on the actual redistribution, so it would look like it was the clever-clever doing the job.

3. [spending] appears to have been modest as compared with a string of other countries in western Europe. If so, exactly what are the grounds for claiming that New Labour was “profligate”? – the other countries might be even more profligate?

4. All that said, I agree that evidence is required to support the claim that Blair and Brown were “recklessly extravagant or wasteful”. But I can think of a few multi-billion pound projects.

It did work an hour or so back when tested several times – and I have the chart on retrievable PDF file on my HD as a result.

For reasons best known to itself and member state governments, the OECD now imposes a short expiry time on links to its data sources. It didn’t used to and I suspect that governments have intervened to curb online citations of data which can prove inconveniently embarrassing for official propaganda lines. Try googling on: OECD general government expenditures

The category: general government expenditures, is necessary to cover spending by both central and local or regional governments since the extent of devolved spending varies from one country to another.

“But I can think of a few multi-billion pound projects.”

It has been known for decades that defence procurement in the MOD was at best hopelessly badly managed and occasionally corrupt – I call recall some jail sentences on MOD civil servants during the 1980s.

Many of us warned about Patricia Hewitt’s ill-conceived proposals for a national database of NHS personal medical records costing £12.7bn when it first surfaced but that had Blair’s enthusiastic blessing although it was widely recognised that the extent of Blair’s computer literacy skills was unusually limited. By reports, he never quite got to grips with using his laptop.

There is a currently fascinating online debate about the merits of the coalition government’s proposals for a £33bn high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham and from there up north. This from the leader of Buckinghamshire CC is very convincing – and he can hardly be accused of being “leftist”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16018191

I shall be watching to see how that plays out when it comes to the government’s announcement.

@16 there are none ,which makes it all the more sad that Labour did nothing to defend themselves and have ended up losing the trust of their supporters and everyone else for that matter.
@14 Sahil I think you are right to raise the issue of power .This correlates highly with wealth however. What is needed to overcome this is the State controlling the country instead of the wealthy controlling the state.
Redistribution in this context doesn’t imply borrowing shed loads. Take the first Tory cut of 6 Billion. That could have been paid for by Vodaphone outright.And there are many examples where that comes from.Lets not talk about the banking industry!
I think the pressing issue in our society is transparency in the markets and in how business relates to the State and vice versa. Closing the offshore scam so that more revenue comes to the state is also a cheap way of getting in more revenue.Finally I think there needs to be some recognition that without a narrowing between rich and poor, those disadvantaged and disenfranchised elements will find it impossible to contribute to the development of the economy.
Ultimately,I believe anyone thinking along the lines of self help is deluding themselves.

Not when the Tories are ripping poorer people out of their communities with their LHA cuts. A significant proportion of the population will be isolated and not part of any meaningful community. Just how the Tories want it.

@4 – Er, what exactly is wrong with the current land registry?

@13 – Because undermining the other party is cheaper than beating it electorally.

@15 – I’d argue freezing.

I’m also amused by the Tories arguing that the Nordic countries are “profligate”.

Not sure an ex-advertising type who worked for Labour campaigns for several years and then for a member of the Lords is the person to tell me anything thanks. I know the sort, they’ll tell you why something is a great idea until it fails and then they’ll tell why it was a bad idea all along.

On accessing official statistics, others in previous threads have complained of serial problems in finding and/or retrieving official British government stats since the redevelopment of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) website.

Clicking old ONS links often returns the error message: Not found. There is no redirection as with many links to private sector websites and the searcher is just left high and dry. I do not believe the public is well served by this experience from redeveloping the ONS website if there is a genuine intention to maintain public information. In these times of austerity, it would have been better to have saved on the costs of redeveloping the ONS website.

Be that as it may, claims of “profligacy” are being flung around without criteria to establish what is meant or supporting evidence. It happens that I think the 6 or so billions spent on the invasion of Iraq would have been better saved, as well as the 2 to 3 billions currently being spent on reorganising the NHS.

There used to be an old black joke in the civil service about spending public money: A million here and a million there and pretty soon we’re speaking of serious money. After modernisation, that has probably become: After a billion here and a billion there . . .

In case anyone mistakenly believes that Britain’s Ministry of Defence is somehow internationally outstanding in its procurement mismanagement, try this hair raising report from 2003 in the American press about the US Department of Defense:

Can Labour and the Left think beyond just spending more money? An example of how it could do that starts of with the line:

People pay a fee and thereby become entitled to home visits from security-checked helpers

So this example is about collecting money. The only difference is it about who we collect the money from. Never mind the fact that the State spends seventeen Billion quid treating this illness, it would be in the State’s interest in rolling out that scheme across the Country, never mind that we could save billions from it, oh no, impossible to divert money from one source to another, lest a Tory might have to put their hand into their pocket to fight a disease that they might not even get. God forbid that the vulnerable be sheltered from a cripling disease, via the State, God forbid that a pensioner may get ‘something for nothing’ and we get to save 17 billion quid in the process. God forbid a banker could lose two quid from his bonous that could be put to good use, far better to take ‘a fee’ from a pensioner.

People pay a fee and thereby become entitled to home visits from security-checked helpers – some paid, some volunteers – who can do anything from hacking back bushes in the garden to setting up the Freeview box on the TV to teaching you how to send text messages to your grandchildren.

So basically this is a scheme to provide cheap domestic help for the middle classes? Because a lot of poor people won’t be able to afford the fees. It is a direct middle class subsidy towards employing servants, right?

OK. I am fine with that. I think going into Service is better than rotting on the dole. The feral underclass could do with an example of, you know, how a real family works. How food is prepared. That sort of thing. But that is because I don’t really think of myself as a Leftist any more.

So I think you’re going to have to work harder on selling this message. Because few people are going to see it, as worthy as it is, as Left wing.

This needs to be filed under questions to which the answer is no, at least insofar as Labour Governments are concerned. The money has to be spent, to build up the client state. Then at election time the client state can be frightened with stories as to how wicked Tories will cut your benefits. Last year’s election, particularly in inner London, was notably filthy due to this blatant attitude from Labour activists that they had spent 13 years shelling out the bribes and now it was time for the punters to return the favour.

No one believes you ever were on the Left, SMFS. You remain as ever, a cartoon character made of one-dimensional Right-wing talking points. One of them seems to be that any ideas expressed by a person who is Left-wing, must also be Left-wing, always. If you ever had been a Leftist, I would have thought that would be obvious to you but it seems not.

Yes. The left can think in terms of radically deconstructing the modern system of corporate statism entirely, even down to removing the concept of money altogether.

But while money still exists and the global system of capitalism is still the dominant form of wealth creation and distribution, the left have absolutely no business not taxing as much money from the top and spending it as widely as possible.

The aim is not just to “solve problems”. The aim is to redistribute the wealth, to prevent its accumulation by the upper crust and the inequality that comes from that. To solve one of the big, major problems that lies at the heart of most of the other issues. The wealthy have too much money and the poor don’t have enough. It’s pretty much that simple.

I always suspect that people who wish to overcomplicate the process of solving this very simple problem are doing so because they want to distract attention from it. It’s no good using state power to construct a participatory, relationship-led society (or whatever) if we’re also using it to protect the transfer of productivity and wealth creation from the working classes to the rentiers, is it? And it’s no good creating a “pay a fee and get a service” way of saving money for the state unless you have ensured that everyone who might need it also has the money to pay the bloody fee. If you don’t do *that*, you’re using state resources to create a gated system to which the most needy have no access, and what the blithering fuck is the point of that?

I think this article confuses fiscal conservatism with financial efficiency (and I’m not sure why, as the latter concept is easier to sell). Absolutely nothing in the left-wing handbook says that you should spend a large amount of money when the same thing can be achieved with a smaller amount of money.

Recently, Labour seems to be better at this than the Tories (Labour’s worst crime here is ineffeciency, whereas some Tory policies designed to save the state money are being continued despite having the opposite of the intended effect: cutting spending to reduce state finances, a true lose/lose deal). But obviously that’s no reason not to try harder. If we can save money without affecting services, let’s do it.

Absolutely nothing in the left-wing handbook says that you should spend a large amount of money when the same thing can be achieved with a smaller amount of money.

Except that virtually every rehearsal of the successes of the last Government (and, yes I know Gordon Brown’s not left wing etc etc) included a stream of “spending on x has increased by y billions a year”. If you listen only to the justifications, you’d be left with the strong impression that it was input that mattered, not output.

“If you listen only to the justifications, you’d be left with the strong impression that it was input that mattered, not output.”

No, because you’re selectively reporting said justifications. Have you really never heard a politician support their party or put another party down using non-financial statistics?

The problem is that investment is about the only thing you can point to show you’re supporting long-term goals – for example, if you’re investing in schools now in the hopes of improving achievement levels over the next ten years. And yes, this incentivises investment for the sake of it, but it also suppports long-term policies.

Funnily, that’s exactly the same impression the Tory deficit-fetishists put across. CUT SPENDING CUT SPENDING CUT CUT CUT CUT. Inputs are all that matters. Even if the cuts (and whether they are “real” cuts or not, they result in lost jobs, less redistribution and fewer services) result in an increase in deficit spending (as any child could tell you anything that increases unemployment is absolutely guaranteed to do), that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we sack the public sector and drag everyone’s pensions down to the gutter. That’s what’s important here.

I think this is an awfully unambitious type of thinking. The left needs a program to really remodel the economy and society. We need to think about measures such as nationalising the financial sector, limiting newspaper ownership to one title per owner, electing or abolishing the House of Lords, restoring trade unions rights.

This is one of the best accounts of relational welfare and the Blue Labour approach. I really admire Hilary Cottam and participle and there’s a lot to be learnt from it. Congratulations Sahil and please be in touch if you wish. There’s a lot to talk bout,